Resilience I: A Door That Locks Behind You
by hellseries
Summary: Black Widow and Hawkeye attempt to deal with the aftermath of Loki's invasion.


**Resilience I: A Door That Locks Behind You**

By the time we left the Shwarma Palace, the traffic had gone from gridlock to absolute standstill. They weren't even honking anymore. Foot traffic had gone from packed, desperate mobs to quiet, heavily-laden groups wearing sturdy shoes and carrying lights and water bottles, pacing themselves for a long haul. We joined them. In the dark, nobody paid much attention to us. Thor had tossed his cloak over Iron Man's armor, so Stark looked more or less like another stiff-legged old guy draped in a blanket. Thor's armor had vanished to wherever it goes when he's through with it, so he was just a blond football player in dark clothes. Captain America had taken his gloves off to eat, and he'd draped his jacket over his shield, inside out. Banner was doing his usual self-effacing shuffle. Nobody notices Clint in a crowd anyway, and I can be inconspicuous when I need to, despite the hair and the leather.

We trudged along for a while. Banner broke from the group to help when a wheelchair got hung up in the rubble, but the bystanders gathered around without comment and heaved it loose before he took more than a few steps, so he shrugged and got back in line.

Eventually there was a street with working streetlights and traffic lights, with vehicles actually moving along it, and one of the vehicles was the usual shiny black SUV with the SHIELD logo. Thor exchanged a few quiet words with the driver, nodded to us and flew off, presumably to deal with Loki. Stark waved the car off and mumbled to himself, or into a headset mike, presumably arranging his own ride. The rest of us piled in. Phil had—no, whoever took over from Phil had arranged some kind of lodging for us. We took it for granted as we always had.

Nobody said anything. Captain America picked pita crumbs off his pants. Banner rubbed his scalp and squinted. I wondered if he kept spare glasses on order somewhere. Clint stared out the window.

The townhouse was big but inconspicuous, surrounded by lookalikes and washed in rather dim security lighting. A young, curly-haired SHIELD flunky, earnest and tired-looking, handed us overnight bags and directed us to four bedrooms with half-baths. We dragged ourselves up the stairs. Rogers was the only one too proud to use the handrail. Or maybe he didn't need it.

I was last in line, but Clint hesitated, letting me catch up with him. He took a breath in, then didn't seem to know what to do with it.

"You okay?" I asked, knowing it was a stupid question. He had a look I'd seen before on colleagues' faces; most of them hadn't lasted long after displaying it.

"No."

"Sorry. I knew that."

"Would…will you stay with me? I'll take the floor."

"I don't think I can stay awake."

"You don't need to."

"Okay."

He held the door open for me, closed it behind me, pulled the coverlet and one of the pillows off the bed and tossed them on the floor. We both dropped our bags and I collapsed onto the bed. "Not gonna fight you for the floor, Clint."

"No problem." He used the bathroom, washed briefly and came out rubbing his dripping hair with a hand towel.

"Do I need to pitch my weapons out the window?" I asked blurrily.

"No. If I offed myself you'd find me in the morning. I can keep from doing that to you. Not sure I give a shit about anybody else right now."

"Okay. Sleep if you can. Talk to you tomorrow."

His "спасибо"_(1)_ came from a long way off, or maybe I dreamed it.

Sometime before dawn I got up, relieved myself, and shed the leather jumpsuit. Amelia Earhart may have slept in hers, but I prefer not to. The security lights leaking around the blinds showed Clint curled in a tight ball on his pallet, still breathing. I fell into bed the second time nearly as hard as the first, and was asleep even faster.

The next time I surfaced it was morning, judging by the light that made it through the blinds**. **There were no clocks in sight and I didn't care enough to dig out my phone. I rolled over, a lot more slowly and carefully than I'd planned at first, and took stock. Clint, still asleep on the floor. Me, more or less in one piece but with a lot of new areas of pain queueing up behind the huge black/purple bruise that covered most of my right side. I forced myself to take a deep breath, miraculously without the lovely grating sensation of broken ribs. I got up quietly, found the right overnight bag on the second try, and took a very careful shower. Getting dressed was a minor ordeal.

Clint was awake when I came out. We locked eyes briefly, then he glanced away. Embarrassed already, by his weakness of the previous night? He still looked like hell. The marks of my teeth in his forearm had darkened overnight. There was a slight tremor in his hands he couldn't quite conceal as he rummaged through his bag.

For some reason it bothered me more to see him this shaken than to see him entirely given over to Loki's control. Clint brainwashed was still Clint; a known quantity. He'd fought me the way he always fought: economical, direct, skillful and determined. _Nothing personal, I'm just here to kill you._ Today—today for the first time I wondered if I wanted him on my side.

My phone and Clint's beeped at the same time. I dug mine out of my jumpsuit. Fury wanted us at headquarters for debriefing by 10. Also, there was a memorial service for Coulson planned for 3 in the afternoon.

"Debriefing," I said to Clint. He hadn't bothered to check. "You up for it?"

"I'll make it. Fury won't be an ass about it."

"And Coulson's funeral. Up for that?"

He shrugged.

"How well did you know him?"

"Not that well. He was Incident Command for the Thor mission; I was Security. We didn't hang out or anything. I liked him."

Clint didn't like many people. Actually, Clint didn't like people. His dossier suggested this was a fairly recent development; he'd been a team player in high school and college.

I waited, but he had nothing more to add.

"You going to get some help?"

He didn't look at me. "Probably not."

"Would you, if I came with you?"

"Definitely not."

"Well, I'm not going to be your therapist. But I'm also not going to let you eat a bullet. Or take a dive onto the pavement."

"You...might want to reconsider that position."

"Don't think so."

He still wouldn't look at me. "Everything I know about you, Loki knows. Everything I guess or suspect about you, Loki knows. I spilled my guts."

"And as soon as I got you away from him you helped turn back his army, and you did your best to put an arrow in his eye. Nice choice with the explosive head, too."

"I'm not sure that's good enough."

"I hear you. And I'm saying, wait. Before you make that decision. Because I think nothing would please Loki more, and I think neither of us wants to give him the satisfaction."

* * *

Debriefing at SHIELD headquarters: one-on-one sessions for each of us with upper management. Fury took Clint. Hill took me. I assumed they'd already interviewed the big guns.

Hill, I think deliberately, told me as much as I told her. She'd seen more of Clint after Loki took him than anyone else on our side, though most of that time they'd been shooting at each other from moving vehicles. That in itself was significant; Hill is a good shot, and Clint is phenomenal. The fact that neither of them was wounded suggested a certain lack of will.

Hill was diplomatic but thorough in wringing me dry of every detail of my encounter with the Hulk. Nothing personal, I know; we need to document anything that might keep the next person who runs afoul of Banner from being reduced to pâté. But I was shaky and weak when we'd finished, and I had to sit for a good ten minutes before I felt I could keep up a decent façade.

Clint was just emerging from his session with Fury when I came out. He looked entirely shut down: expressionless, slightly stiff, aloof. But the tiny tremor in his hands was still there.

Stark, Banner and Rogers were waiting for us. They all looked more or less normal, as if yesterday's events had all been in a day's work. Yay team.

Debriefing part two, as a group, was easier. By Fury's orders, we stuck strictly to the battle of Manhattan. Thor and Selvig were absent, working on a way to return Loki to Asgard. Fury was thoughtful; Banner quiet; Rogers crisp, professional and matter-of-fact. Clint answered what he was asked, and offered the occasional comment or suggestion. I mainly watched and took mental notes on how the others reacted or interacted.

Stark, though he was still a little down from his usual manic flippancy, had a present for us: security-camera footage of Hulk beating the crap out of Loki. I was sorry Thor had missed it. Clint leaned forward and drank in the sight, his eyes more alive than I'd seen them since I took him down. Stark smirked a little and hit "replay". Banner, who'd watched the first time, looked away.

"Play it again," said Clint, intently. "I like the little wheezing sound he makes at the end." Stark played it again.

"It's too bad everyone in New York can't see that," said Clint appreciatively.

"Oh, they can," said Stark. "I uploaded it to YouTube this morning."

Banner covered his face with his hands.

Fury rolled his eye, a gesture oddly more emphatic than it would have been with two. "Take it down, Stark."

"I'm sorry, on what basis were you planning to classify a video I shot on my own surveillance system inside my own damn house?"

Banner came out from behind his hands. "Did you know it's possible to build a hand-held EMP generator with a range of 50 meters? I could demonstrate it for you."

"Fine," groused Stark, and typed furiously on his phone. Fury watched over his shoulder, then grunted in satisfaction. As soon as Fury turned his back, Clint made a praying-hands gesture to Stark. Stark mimed "call me" and they both smirked.

Fury's phone chimed. He glanced at it, picked it up, and typed a reply.

The door opened to admit Thor. His ridiculously blue eyes were shining. "It is done, my friends," he declaimed. "Erik Selvig has found the way for me to return Loki and the Tesseract to Asgard."

"Will you be able to get back here afterwards?" Captain America asked.

"I will come at need, with the Tesseract or without it, " Thor said firmly. His certainty was charming, even when you knew how many times he'd been wrong.

"How soon can you take Loki off our hands?" asked Fury.

"We should be ready by mid-morning tomorrow," said Thor. "Name the place."

"Central Park," said Fury. "Not a media event, but there should be witnesses from the city." There were nods around the table.

"I'll be there," I said. "Just in case." One by one, the others nodded agreement.

Finally, Fury dismissed us on our own recognizance. "As of now I'm officially not worrying about where you're headed. I'll either see you at Agent Coulson's memorial service this afternoon, or not. Ditto the private service at field station Bravo tonight. If you need anything, see Agents Vashisht, Warren or Mullis. Consider this a paid sabbatical for a minimum of eight weeks, at the usual per diem rates. In advance, if you prefer. Call us; we won't call you, unless we absolutely have to."

"Do I get the per diem?" Stark asked.

"Sure, if you'll sign your income for the eight weeks over to us in exchange," said Fury.

"Party pooper."

* * *

Coulson's public funeral was small and low-key and mostly full of SHIELD agents pretending not to be while they scanned the assembly for faces they didn't recognize-or faces they did. There were few surprises; it was like the old joke about the Chechen separatist cell whose members all turned out to be KGB agents. There was a brief flurry when a thin, worn-looking woman turned up near the end; she hung back till the service was over, then made her way up to the grave to drop a folded note into it. We gave her space, but several agents snapped her photo on their cell phones while pretending to text or check the time. (She turned out to be a convenience store clerk from New Mexico who'd caught a red-eye flight into Logan and driven straight here. The note said "Thanks for saving my life.")

I stuck close to Clint throughout. He didn't fidget, exactly, but he looked tense and hypervigilant.

"Want to get out of here?" I asked.

"Uh-huh. You?"

"Fine with me. Where to?"

He stood still, processing. I waited. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly, and he walked out to the street and hailed a cab.

Cab, subway, and a short walk delivered us to, of all things, an REI store. In Manhattan. What can't you find in New York? I should not have been surprised that the clerks knew him by name, but they did and I was. I smiled a little and nodded a lot and learned that we were "heading up to ANWR for a while." They had all his sizes on file; while they fitted me for boots and tried various packs, jackets and gloves on me, he was busy on his phone checking flights. Apparently he didn't care whether SHIELD tracked him; he paid for everything with his company card (I took my per diem in cash, thanks) and had most of it shipped ahead of us to a hotel in Fairbanks.

"Decisiveness is good," I remarked as we left with the few items we'd elected to take with us.

"Your turn," he answered. "Where are we eating, and where are we spending the night?"

* * *

We ate at Les Amis; we got a room—two kings—at the James. We got room-service coffee.

"The two beds," I said after twenty minutes of possibly-companionable silence, "are not a declaration. They're a field for negotiation."

"Mm."

"It's hard to interrogate someone who won't ask questions," I said.

"Hence my not asking questions," he said.

"So you've read my files."

"I wrote some of them."

I sighed. "Well, you know, then, that you can't believe anything I say or do, or even my heart rate or vascular response. So why are we here?"

He shook his head.

"All right, how's this: I happen to know that you like to please women. You might have noticed, it pleases me for you to stay alive. I've gone to a fair amount of trouble lately to make that happen."

"I happen to know that you have a thing about paying debts. From your perspective, you owed me one. You paid it."

"How about from your perspective?"

"I conserved a valuable asset."

"Пизьдук._(2)_ You don't risk your life and disobey a direct order for the sake of a 'valuable asset'. You did that for me, not for SHIELD."

His mouth twisted. "You going to tell me that you love me now?"

"I'm telling you that I want you at my back. And I'd rather have you there than anyone else."

"Would you? Now?"

"I would. There are things even I can't say with a straight face, so I'll spare you the crap. But if anything I can give you can help you come back from this, it's yours."

"Are you offering me a pity fuck?"

"If that's all you'll take. Personally I was more thinking a 'holy shit, we're alive' fuck. But I'm not picky."

"What do you want? No, never mind. Don't answer that. I wouldn't believe you anyway."

"Okay, then tell me what you want. Not big-picture. Next 24 hours."

"Will you come to ANWR with me?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

I laughed. "I've never been to ANWR. I miss the aspens turning gold in the hills above my uncle's dacha. I've never seen you shoot anything for fun. I like to wear fur. I'm tired of New York. Pick one."

"You don't have an uncle. The dacha belonged to your aunt, and there weren't many aspens."

"Yeah, well, the outhouse wasn't much fun either."

"Will you sleep with me?"

"Yes. Literally or not. But keep in mind that I'm not in my usual form, since I just got slapped across the room into a bulkhead by the Hulk."

He winced. "I can do without the usual form."

"I know." I pondered this for a moment. "This is what I am, Clint. I can't help...knowing where the target is and how to hit it."

"Is that all it is to you?"

"No. Archery's more to you than hitting targets. It was, even before Barcelona. Even the first time you picked up a bow."

He thought about that for a while.

"Look," I continued. "Let's assume that I'm trying to manipulate you into doing my bidding. Is it that hard to believe that what I'm after is an evening of hot sex followed by a solid eight hours of sleep and then breakfast?"

"And what do I get in exchange?"

"An evening of hot sex followed by eight hours of sleep and then breakfast. I'm being reasonable, for me. Also you know damn well that near-death experiences make me horny, except when I've lost too much blood. I seem to remember you feeling the same way."

His eyes were the eyes of an assassin: clear, cold, analytical. He closed them just before I kissed him. My body sang with the touch of him, the sweetly-knit shoulders, the short crisp hair at the back of his head. I held on to him fiercely, as I'd wanted to since I'd heard Coulson's gentle, regretful _Tasha, Barton's been compromised_. He tasted of coffee and, faintly, of blood; his lower lip was split. We toppled sideways onto the bed. He buried one hand in my hair and slid the other up the back of my shirt to unhook my bra.

After a while he sat up and stripped off his t-shirt. I reached for him again, then stopped abruptly. A new, pink scar about four inches long ran parallel to his sternum. The blade should have been deflected by the fourth and fifth ribs; instead, it had apparently passed right through them. He flinched when I touched it, but didn't pull away.

"How are you not dead?"

"Beats me. I could ask you the same. Weren't you in a fight with the Hulk?"

"Like a fly in a fight with a fly swatter," I said, and slipped off my own shirt along with the bra, somewhat awkwardly. He studied my bruises, mouth tightening.

"Christ. Any broken ribs?"

"No, amazingly enough. Look, did they do an MRI on you?"

"Yes. Everything under the skin's more or less intact."

"More or less?"

"There's a shadow on my heart. Only the heart. Not on the ribs or the lung."

"That is creepy as hell."

"Yeah. Almost as creepy as having a psychopath take over your brain."

"How much do you remember?"

"Bits and pieces. Probably something to do with the knock on the head."

"You're welcome."

"I'm not complaining. What happened in Stuttgart?"

"Can we hold off on that for a while?"

"No."

"Well, I can't help you. I was co-piloting a jet at the time. Never saw you. If I had, we'd have had that fight sooner. How's the concussion, by the way? Headaches?"

"Tasha, don't patronize me."

"Okay. Then don't threaten to kill yourself and ask me for ammunition."

He turned away. His jaw muscles worked. "If it were you, would you be willing to just pretend it never happened?"

"Clint. You know my history. You can guess how much of that I have to do, just to keep getting up in the morning."

"How can you not care?"

"It's not that I don't care, it's...Alexei said every second is a door that locks behind you. You can't go back. You can only go forward."

He looked back at me. "How?"

I shrugged. "Same way you did the first time you killed someone. The first time you failed on a mission. The first time someone died because you screwed up."

He shook his head. "Do you even remember the first time you killed someone? What were you, twelve?"

"Fourteen."

"Your file says twelve."

"Either SHIELD has the wrong birthdate, or the guy I hit with a rock in the demonstration died after I left. He was still breathing last time I saw him."

"He died in the hospital."

I shrugged again, licked my finger and made a tally mark in the air. "So I was off by one. I revise my statement: in some cases, I actually don't care."

"Did you know he was FSB?"

"No. I just knew he beat up my friends. But if he was FSB, that explains why there was a record of it for SHIELD to dig up." I thought back over Clint's dossier. "Your first time. You were...twenty-six?"

"Twenty-five. It was two weeks before my birthday."

"That's right. End of October. Guard spotted you going over the wall at the old embassy compound in Kosovo."

"Yeah. I shot him, dragged him out of sight, retrieved my arrow, finished the reconaissance, got out of there and spent the rest of the night in a basement having the dry heaves."

"And it didn't occur to you to disguise the wound."

"Not till it was too late."

I smiled. "That's how I first heard of you. Alexei told me the Americans had some kind of ninja with a bow or a crossbow."

"No shit."

"I decided then, if I ever got to interrogate you, to ask you why the hell anyone runs around in this day and age with a damn bow."

"But you didn't."

"No. By the time I finally met you, I had more important things on my mind."

(I remembered the cold realization that nothing I could do could keep him from releasing the arrow or get me out of its path. And the incredulity and rage, as he said in his perfect Moscow accent, _Your bosses have gotten the word by now that you gave us Vanya Chernenko, and that you've been passing intel to us for months. So you have three choices: die now, quick and clean; come back with me to SHIELD; or try to get away from me, and then try to convince the higher-ups you're not a traitor._)

"You cut it pretty close, you know. I almost said 'go ahead and shoot,' I was so pissed off."

He gave me an ironic little head-tilt of acknowledegement.

(He'd lent me his earpiece so I could hear the chatter on the scrambled channel as my superiors gave orders for me to be shot on sight. Not one of them had spoken up for me. _You deserve better_, he'd said. And when his extraction team showed up and immediately drew weapons, he wrapped himself around me as a shield, and I realized he was supposed to have killed me.)

"You took away everything I had. And all you gave me was the truth, and the chance to choose for myself. No wonder I followed you."

He studied his thumbnail, bitten to the quick, but said nothing.

"And I never did get a chance to interrogate you. Answer me one question?"

"What's that?"

"Who did give you Chernenko?"

He shook his head. "You can't have that one. Pick another question."

"Okay." I mulled over my options for a while. "Here's one. Why didn't you win at Barcelona? Why'd you drop out? Your SHIELD file is pretty vague on that point. And our side didn't know either."

He grimaced. "Couple of guys who'd bet on Flute dragged me into an alley and shot me full of anabolic steroids."

"Good grief."

"I ran into one of them a few years later. He was a cop. Neither of us said anything." He ran his fingers through his hair. "By '96 I was working for SHIELD. And by then the Olympics seemed a little lame." He half-laughed. "They should have sent me. I could have saved Richard Jewell a lot of grief."

"You were busy. Stopping those gun-runners in Oaxaca, am I right? You saved a lot of lives." I stroked a hand down his back. It was tight and knotted, and his skin was cold. "Here. Lie down." He did, and I worked on him for a while, digging in hard to the trigger points until he groaned.

"God. I forgot about the massage parlor. Don't stop."

I kissed the nape of his neck. "I won't."

Gradually the muscles of his back turned warm and supple under my hands. He rolled over and pulled me down on top of him, and for a while both of us forgot everything but each other.

* * *

_I felt a light tap on my cheek. Then a firmer tap. Then a light slap. I opened my eyes. I wasn't where I'd been. No hotel room; this was...underground somewhere, a basement or storage room. Fluorescent shop lights were too few and too dim to reveal the walls. I was sitting in a tall metal chair with arms and a curved headrest, and I was strapped tightly to it, forehead, neck, arms, wrists, waist, legs and ankles. I was also gagged, firmly but not tightly enough to break the skin. I was sick, disoriented. My head hurt._

_"There she is," said Clint's voice in my ear. I felt his breath stir my hair. By rolling my eyes all the way to the left I could just see him in my peripheral vision. He stepped around in front of me. He was pulling on a pair of neoprene gloves. _

_I made a sound. _

_"Headache, Tasha?" he asked solicitously. He strolled over to a small table and picked up a heavy glass vial half-full of yellow liquid. The ground-glass stopper grated softly as he removed it. "I bet this will take your mind off it," he said. He stepped closer, held the open bottle up to my face, and blew gently across the top of it. My eyes stung and I tried to cough, then gagged. Clint smiled, his rare, bad-boy smile, the one that lit his eyes from within. He put a gloved fingertip over the mouth of the bottle and tilted it, righted it, brought his hand away with a single drop of liquid trembling on his glove. Delicately he shook the drop off onto the back of my hand. The skin where it hit instantly turned yellow and a second or two later searing pain bit into me. The skin blistered, bubbled, burned. I clenched my teeth on the gag and tried to stay silent but a small whimper escaped._

_Clint smiled again, delightedly. He tipped out another droplet. "Shhh," he said, and slowly reached out to touch his finger to my lower lip._

Not a scream, but a strangled moan as I jerked back and fell; I landed hard on my back, scrambling backward, flailing across the carpeted floor until my right hand found the grip of my gun. The light was much dimmer now but I saw his silhouette against the pale wall as he sat up. "Tasha?" he said indistinctly.

I had the safety off and the trigger half-squeezed before he focused on me. He froze, bare hands open in front of him. There was a silent, motionless moment.

"Tasha," he said softly and much more clearly. "I'm unarmed. You have the gun. You're in control."

My breath was ragged in my chest. My head was pounding. I dared not take my eyes off him to look around, but I could see he was sitting on the hotel bed; I could make out the edge of the dresser and the curtained window behind him. There was carpet under my bare legs. No pain in my hand; no numbness of the arms or legs, no soreness at the corners of my mouth. I couldn't have been tied up any time recently.

Clint waited, eyes steady, hands still.

Moving slowly and deliberately, I eased off on the trigger, thumbed the safety back on, took the barrel in my left hand and passed the gun to him, butt first. He set it behind him, without turning away from me.

"Bad dream?"

I nodded, unable to speak. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and got down on the floor with me.

"Хорошо?" he asked quietly, holding his arms open.

"Да. Спасибо."_(3)_ I leaned on him for a while and shook.

"Loaded weapons next to the bed, maybe not such a good idea for now," he observed. I nodded. He squeezed my shoulders and left me for a moment; I heard him unloading my pistols, then his, and stowing the clips in his bag. He came back and put his arms around me again. "You want to talk about it?" I shook my head.

After a while he tugged me to my feet and we went back to bed.

* * *

I woke up to the smell of coffee and arnica. For an instant I thought I was back in Volgograd, training with Alexei. Then the more recent past caught up with me. I groaned.

"I have to get up now, don't I," I said resignedly.

"Yep. Time to go see Loki off. Which of these would you like first?"

"Coffee. Then will you help me with the arnica? I can't get my right arm behind me."

"Sure."

Central Park, mid-morning. Everyone was in civvies except Thor and Loki. Well, I suppose they were in what passed for civvies in Asgard. I stuck close to Clint. His breathing was just a little too fast. His hands were restless. I knew he had at least three weapons on him that could reach Loki from where we stood. I wasn't sure what I would do if he went for one. He had sunglasses on, making it harder than usual to read his expression.

I leaned in to whisper in Clint's ear. Loki's laser-target gaze snapped to us instantly. "Hawkeye," I breathed. "Wham. Wham. Wham. Wheeeeeeeeeeze."

And as Thor activated the tesseract, Clint's mouth curved up in genuine pleasure.

After that, the party broke up quickly. Captain America seemed pleased with the motorcycle he'd bought; off to tour the country. Stark and Banner were headed to Nerd Candyland together, a frightening thought; they looked even more pleased. Clint and I were headed to the airport, thence to Fairbanks and the Arctic. I wondered what Fury planned to tell his shadowy bosses about where we'd all gone.

* * *

A long, long flight from JFK to Fairbanks. A night in the airport hotel, or rather a day spent sleeping and a short Northern night spent unpacking, arranging and re-packing the gear that had been shipped here for us. We'd have the following day and night here too, since the bush pilot Clint had chosen wouldn't have an opening in her schedule until then.

"Couldn't we have hired a different pilot?" I asked.

"Not one that would let me fly the plane," he said. "Jeannine and I are old friends."

The name rang a faint bell. "Jeannine...Jeannine from Budapest?"

"That's her."

"Боже мой._(4)_ You believed that story of hers about why she missed pickup?"

"Nope. But I figured out why she was lying to us. She and I had it out later. We're good."

I wasn't thrilled by this. It's not my habit to give more weight to a third party's good word than to someone's own actions. But hadn't I just asked the Avengers to do the same for Clint? And Captain America had taken my word for it, right after seeing Clint lead an assault against us.

"Okay, fine. But unless Fairbanks is more fun than I'm expecting it to be, you owe me."

"I'm okay with that."

"You already owe me for that 'continental breakfast'."

"Hey, North America is a continent."

Fairbanks wasn't a thrill a minute, but on the other hand it was nice not to have anyone shooting at us. I amused myself by speaking only in Russian to tweak the natives. Clint, good sport that he sometimes is, played along. Also, early the next morning a moose crossed the highway in front of us, which was at least entertaining.

* * *

"Jeannine, this is Natasha. Natasha, Jeannine."

"Oh Lord. Listen, about Budapest—" The pilot had a strong Southern accent, odd to hear up here. She appeared to be in her early fifties, but might have been younger; she had that leathery outdoorsy complexion that makes it difficult to tell. Her hair was grey-blonde, pulled back in a ponytail; her hands narrow and strong, with very well-kept nails. That must have been a challenge in her job; she'd certainly have to do most of her own maintenance on the plane.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "I don't need to know."

"Okay, but this flight's on the house. And the one after that. And if you need anything else, just ask." Interesting. I'd assumed she and Clint had a particular kind of history, but watching the two of them together made me revise that. 'Old friends' might not have been a euphemism after all. They were very relaxed with each other and there were hints of shared history, certain mannerisms of each other's that they mirrored unconsciously. And she was definitely more attracted to me than she was to him, though probably not conscious of showing it. There might be a story there worth hearing, if the opportunity presented itself.

Jeannine—or rather, Jeannine's plane, piloted by Clint with the owner navigating—took us far out past the outskirts of Fairbanks, over a huge, dark boreal forest that actually did make me a little homesick, and eventually out over the open tundra. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, melting fast in the sun, lingering on the shady sides of hills and boulders. Glaciers on distant peaks sparkled around the edges with meltwater. The sky was enormous, with no clouds, no other aircraft, not even birds to act as landmarks in the vastness. We hung suspended in a bowl of light for hours. No one spoke until well into the afternoon.

"Sometime in the next hour," Jeannine said at last. "So I'll have enough fuel to get home."

"Okay," Clint answered. "Where's a good place to set down?"

"Turn ten degrees east. You'll see a stream in about four or five minutes. There's a pretty level area on the other side."

They busied themselves with navigation, arranging pickup, and finally landing, which Clint did with only one bounce.

"Need more practice, Robin Hood," Jeannine teased.

"Yeah. More props, fewer jets."

"More flying, less shooting," she suggested.

"And less being shot at. Thanks, Jeannine."

"Any time." She turned to me. "Nice meeting you. Maybe another time we can compare notes. Inside and outside perspectives on SHIELD, sort of."

"I'll look forward to it." Oh yes. There was definitely a story I needed to hear, later on.

* * *

It was a strange time we spent there, in the pale silence. Clint seemed...not thoughtful, really, but still, with the kind of deep stillness he had right before he released an arrow. Marksmen are trained to shoot between their own heartbeats; it was as if we were poised between heartbeats of the universe, where there was infinite time and space.

I was glad for Clint, and to some extent I relaxed too, as I stopped fearing that he would suddenly turn suicidal. But I kept being uncomfortably reminded of Siberia. The back of my neck prickled with the sense of exposure. I wanted some buildings to hide in. Or trees. Trees would be good. Well, there were trees here, but they were only a few inches tall; a perfect miniature forest beginning to kindle with fall color. Lovely, but not much help.

Clint spent a lot of time sitting alone, not far from me but at a small distance. He gazed out over the tundra, or out into the sky. I couldn't tell whether he actually looked or just happened to have his face turned in a particular direction.

"What do you see?" I asked him once as he sat staring into apparently empty air.

"Eagles. Two of them. Goldens, I think." I strained but saw nothing except, eventually, little swimming dots throughout my field of vision. He tilted his head back and smiled at me. "I can see your house from here, you know."

I snorted.

"No, really. You left a window open upstairs."

I sat down beside him. He resumed his study of the sunlit void.

"Clint?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you stay here, if you could?"

His face closed down again. "Grow a beard, hide out in a cabin, pretend the past 15 years didn't happen? No."

"What if you didn't have to pretend?"

"What?"

"You know what SHIELD has in the way of psych tech. If you don't want to live with your memories, they can be edited."

"Fuck that," he spat, scrambling to his feet. "I'm half ready to shoot myself because my brain's been turned inside out and you want me to volunteer to do it again?"

"You wouldn't know the difference. Afterward."

"That is sick, Tasha."

"Hear me out," I said, leaning back on my elbows to look up at him. "You'd make a good EMT, I think. Wilderness rescue. You wouldn't need much more emergency med training. You'd need a few brush-up hours on a prop plane, but that's easy. Spend the rest of your time saving lives, instead of killing. This landscape—you can see for miles. It suits you."

"Stop it."

"You wouldn't even have to give up archery. Nobody up here would bat an eye at another bowhunter. Should be easy to come up with a history to fit your new ID. Maybe a war record, to explain some of the scars and the weapons skills. Desert Storm, or Iraqi Freedom. Or Kosovo. No—UNPROFOR, or Afghanistan. To account for the Russian." He was looking at me with a curious mixture of disgust and hunger, like a sober addict confronting a pusher. "Loki would never find you," I added, "as long as you kept a low profile."

"And if Loki found you?"

I shrugged. "You'd never hear about it. Or if you did, it'd just be a crawl on CNN. Nothing to do with you." I half-smiled. "There'd be a certain satisfaction in watching him waste his time, trying to force me to tell him where you were—when I didn't know. Alaska's a big, big place."

"You are a sick, twisted woman."

"You'd rather he made you torture me? That was his offer last time. Twice as much fun as being tortured to death by anyone else."

Clint winced. "Yeah. That sounds like him."

"If you disappeared, at least I wouldn't have that to look forward to. I'm serious about this, Clint. Consider it. There actually is a way out for you."

"But not for you?"

"I don't need one. Yet."

"Well, it would conveniently get me off your neck," he said bitterly.

"You know what? Fuck it," I said, sitting up. "You can't live with yourself, and you'd rather die than become someone you can live with. And I'm some kind of monster. Why? Because I'd rather one of us died than both of us? Or because I'd rather part of you died than all of you? Look, if you were trapped in a collapsed building and I had to amputate your right arm to get you out, I'd do it. With or without your consent. It's a matter of priorities."

"Great. So if I'm suicidal, that justifies a lobotomy? Or electroshock therapy? With or without my consent?"

"No, damn it. That's different. First of all I'm talking about reprogramming, not carving up your brain. Second, never without your consent."

"Why not? What's the difference? You said yourself, I'd never know it."

"That's exactly the difference. If I cut off your arm, you'd still be able to fight me, sue me, shoot me in the back, whatever. If I took you for reprogramming, I wouldn't have to face you afterwards. You wouldn't be there for me to face, afterwards. So no, not without your consent. Even to save your life, there are things I won't do."

"Oh, that's very reassuring."

"Can I just ask you, if you didn't want me fighting to keep you alive, why the hell did you bring me up here? So I could fight off wolves while digging your grave in the permafrost? Very Russian, I admit, but not very satisfying. And it seems like a waste of good wolves."

He shifted restlessly. "I don't know. Maybe I hoped you'd take the decision out of my hands."

"What, shoot you? Nearly got your wish, back at the James. But now that we're keeping the guns and ammo separate, it's not likely." I started to say, _just wait till I'm asleep, put a pistol in my hand and make a noise like the Hulk_, but I bit my lip to keep from going down that path.

"On the other hand," I said, "if you have a plan for how I could knock you out, tie you up and get you from here to a SHIELD psych facility singlehandedly, I'd like to hear it. Especially since you hired a pilot who's known you..." I thought about that for a while, replaying the little tells I'd spotted. "She's known you since you were a kid?"

He shook his head. "You are good. Yeah. Since I was ten."

"Is she a way of protecting yourself from me?"

"I...don't really know."

"Do you want to live, or not?"

"No. But I'm...trying to be flexible on that point. If only, as you said, to spite Loki. But that's part of the problem."

"You're worried about facing him again?"

"That, yeah. But mainly I'm worried about what kind of back door he might have installed in my head, and what might come out of it."

I whistled. "You brought me up here as bait."

His eyes opened wide. "Oh hell no. You—"

"I think maybe you did. You're testing yourself."

"God damn it, Tasha, you think—"

"I think if I were trying to lure something of Loki's out of my id...yes. The woman you love, sleeping next to you night after night, with nowhere to hide and no help to call on." I shook my head admiringly. "And here I thought it was just about the sex."

He glared down at me, body rigid, breathing rapid and shallow. "Don't. Fucking. Taunt me."

I sighed and raised my hands in surrender. "I'm sorry. That wasn't intended as a taunt. And it wasn't fair." I got to my feet, deliberately turning my back to him; dusted off my jeans. "I'm going for a run. Back before sunset." I bit my tongue to hold back _If you kill yourself, at least try to do it neatly_.

"Tasha," he said, and his voice was still rough, but softer; "be careful."

I discarded a couple of replies before I settled on "You too."

The tundra, being less smooth than it looked, demanded a fair amount of attention to footing. I couldn't really open up for speed, particularly in light-hikers, and anyway I was focused mainly on putting some distance between us, and ideally some solid objects too. Not being seen by Hawkeye takes some doing, especially in a large, well-lit, open space. Within a few kilometers I found a small watercourse and turned to follow it upstream. It tucked itself into a fold of the landscape that dropped about a meter below the level plain. Eventually I found a small pebbly patch of streambank where I could sit, out of his line of sight from the camp.

I sat and watched the thin sheet of water rippling in the sun and tried to pull myself together. An intense wave of hatred for Loki rose up and nearly made me vomit. I'd hated before, killed without remorse, even killed with pleasure; but this went further. What he had taken from me—no. It was what he might yet take from me that was important.

I remembered a captive falcon I'd seen in Kyrgyzstan, its eyelids sewn shut to tame it. I was playing spy then and had to keep a bland, polite face for its captors, but now I wept for it, and for Clint, and, like the mewling quim Loki had named me, for myself.

The sun was getting low by the time I stopped crying. I washed my face in the icy stream. If I ran hard enough on the way back, the exertion and the cold would suffice to explain my blotchy face, red eyes and sniveling.

I still had to watch my footing, the more so given the long shadows, but I pushed myself as hard as I could on the relatively smooth stretches. No helpful endorphin rush came to my assistance. Instead, as the sky shaded into deeper and deeper blue and the sun touched the horizon, I began to feel the ground shake under me and see sparkles at the edges of my vision. Showers of broken glass and fragments of metal flew forward past me, and my death was breathing down my neck and gaining rapidly. I ran blind, stumbling and gasping, until only by luck I spotted the tiny light in the distance that was our camp, and hurled myself toward it with all my remaining strength. As I staggered the last few meters Clint dove out the door of the tent, tucked and rolled to his feet, snapped his bow open and had an arrow on the string, positioned for a shot at whatever was behind me. If I'd had the breath, I would have laughed with relief. As it was, I fell flat on my face as my legs turned to water under me. The impact of my cheek on the gravelly soil jolted me out of the flashback, and I hugged the ground, retching and trembling. After a moment Clint dropped to a seat beside me.

"From the sound of it, I thought there was a bear after you," he said.

"No. Just a Hulk," I gasped. "Thanks for the rescue, though."

He squeezed my shoulder without replying.

"About before. I'm sorry," I said. "I'm—I can't be objective about this."

Another squeeze. He sat there for a while, then got up, with a light touch on the back of my head, and went back into the tent.

_Please don't leave me _was on my tongue, but I held it back. Another in the long list of things he could never believe, coming from me.

* * *

As fate would have it, we spent most of the next day huddled in the tent; a mixture of rain and sleet began falling halfway through breakfast and lasted all day, changing to sleet and snow shortly after nightfall. We tried to stay out of each other's way, which in the tight quarters was frankly comical. Clint stripped, cleaned and reassembled all the firearms. I sharpened all the blades and reorganized our gear, did a more nearly adequate job of dressing the scrape on my face, and spent a good hour stretching, trying to get back some semblance of normal range of motion after the assorted injuries and yesterday's panicked run. We stared at the tent ceiling. We played about a dozen hands of poker with a deck of cards I'd forgotten I had. Both of us cheated, but he caught me more times than I caught him.

Dinner was less than inspired. Clint and I were both competent cooks, but neither of us was up to creating four-star cuisine over a Primus stove. Most of the time it was a toss-up between our own cooking and MREs. If we finished this meal, it would only be because it was less trouble than burying the leftovers far enough away not to attract bears to the campsite.

Clint gazed with disfavor at the remaining half-cup of rather thin stew. "Glad we're not living off the land till spring," he said.

I shrugged. "There's a reason I became a spy instead of a fur trapper." I dug in my pack and brought out a flask. "Here. Maybe this will help."

He opened it, sniffed, raised his eyebrows at me and took a shot. "How much of this did you bring?"

"I'm Russian. I brought enough to give us both alcohol poisoning, of course. I suggest we not drink it all in one night."

He passed me the flask. We spent a while trading reminiscences with each round. The stories gradually got sillier. I made him choke with a well-timed anecdote he hadn't heard yet—the one where Stark, after yet another SHIELD attempt to confiscate one of his weapons, had hacked into Fury's phone, reset the outgoing caller ID to "Nick Furry" and replaced all the ringtones and alerts with sound clips from furry porn videos. In turn, he made me giggle until I could hardly breathe with a dead-on impersonation of the VDV veterans singing their anti-Putin song:_(5)_ jaw thrust out, eyes squinted, with just the right passionately resentful delivery. I gasped for air.

"Oh my God, when we get back I am so buying you a striped undershirt and a beret."

"If I wear them, will you sing karaoke with me?"

"You are insane."

"I'm totally serious. First one to laugh buys the drinks. 'O-oh here she comes; watch out boy, she'll chew you up-' "

I threw a stuff sack at him. " 'Cu-pid, draw back your bow-oh!' " I crooned. He grabbed my ankle and tried to pin me. We grappled for a few moments, calling a truce when we narrowly missed knocking over the vodka. We polished off that flask and started on a second. I started feeling philosophical.

"You know what the trouble is with you Americans?" I asked.

"Feel free to tell me," he invited.

"You're spoiled. You don't understand the value of survival, of endurance. My grandmother lost her whole family in the siege of Leningrad. What's the worst your family had to deal with? The Depression?"

"To hear my grandfather tell it, the fact that the Cubs never won the World Series."

"That's right. Spoiled. Now look at us. Two agents, both out of our league, but do you see me drowning in existential angst?" (I was proud of how clearly I managed to say that.) "No. That's because I'm Russian. I'm a realist."

"Maybe it's because you're tougher than me."

"Nonono." I passed him the flask again. "No. You're plenty tough. You just don't have the cultural, the, the collective wisdom, to back it up."

He handed the flask back to me. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

I waved that off, took another shot. "Thing is: we both came up against far, far superior force. Neither of us had any chance of winning. Both of us had limited options. If you'd run—if you'd turned tail as soon as Loki showed up—you'd have gotten away. Of course, he might have taken Fury or Hill instead, and things might have turned out worse. And you'd have something different to hate yourself for."

He took back the flask, stared at it instead of drinking from it.

"If I'd stood my ground against the Hulk, who knows?" I continued. "Maybe he'd have killed me. Maybe he'd just have pounded me a little and let me live. He wasn't going all out—he was much, much faster against the Chitauri than when he was chasing me. But running wasn't a deliberate choice; that was my hindbrain trying to keep me alive. Another day I might have frozen. Maybe the right thing to do, but I'll never know. But you—you chose. Maybe the wrong decision, but at least it was you making it."

He shook his head. "There wasn't any other choice."

"For you, maybe not. That's because you're not a coward. Never have been. But the point is, the only point that matters is: both of us are still alive. Doesn't matter who chose what or why or if we could have done better. You fought. I ran. We're still here."

"Yeah, but the other point is: now what?"

I filched the flask back from him. "Now we keep on breathing. Do you hear me, мой брат?_(6)_ Because we can."

He appeared to have run out of things to say. Just as well. 'I'm sorry I betrayed you to a psychotic god and killed a dozen of our colleagues' didn't need to be said out loud.

I heroically finished off the last of the stew. At some point, Clint had fallen asleep. I nudged him over onto his side so he wouldn't snore, and covered him up.

"Соколиного,"_(7)_ I whispered to him as I switched off the lantern, "I would cut out his heart and grill it for you _en brochette_ if I could."

* * *

The following day was unremarkable; we took a short hike, aired out the tent and sleeping bags in the sun, hung around camp not saying much. Then, unexpectedly, came a night that I hope to remember with my last breath. The sun had slanted below the horizon; the moon had not yet risen. Overhead the aurora flickered and flowed, bright green. The air was unbelievably clear, sharp with frost. There was no wind. Far away a wolf howled. Then two. Then another. Then the whole pack, each voice tuned against the last so that each could be heard rising and falling in eerie clarity. I held my breath. The hair on my arms stood up. Clint and I gazed at each other in disbelief; it was ridiculously, excessively, unbelievably beautiful.

We brought the sleeping bags outside; folded one to sit on, draped the other over our shoulders. It was too cold to get undressed, but we slid our hands under each other's clothes and kissed, shaking with cold, with adrenaline, with desire, with the certainty of mortality. Hour after hour the song and the cold light washed over us, and we held each other, and zipped the sleeping bags together, and wriggled into them and made love, and finally moved into the tent and slept through the dregs of the brief night and well into the morning.

* * *

Two days later Jeannine's plane circled above us, waggled its wings and set down. Without, I noted, bouncing.

"Good trip?" she asked as we loaded our gear. Clint nodded.

"Headed back to Fairbanks?" she asked. He didn't answer, but glanced at me.

"For the night," I said. "Then I need to have a talk with a guy in New York."

Just before we got back to Fairbanks, as soon as I could get a cell signal, I texted Agent Hill. She replied almost at once. I looked over the message. I must have moved or made a sound because Clint turned around from the pilot's seat to look at me.

"Everything OK?"

"Yeah. Tell you later."

We came in smoothly, unloaded the luggage. I shook hands with Jeannine and slipped her one of my secure email addresses—a Stark Industries one, not one of SHIELD's. Clint and I took the shuttle to the hotel and checked in. He unpacked; I didn't.

"Hawkeye. Sit down a minute. I need to talk to you."

He sat, with the closed-in look that was becoming so familiar.

I pulled out my phone and called up Hill's text message; handed it to him.

**Dir. Fury says Barton had a**

**clear shot at close range,**

**but only fired once, minor**

**shoulder wound. Had the**

**drop on me in vehicle bay**

**but didn't fire till Fury**

**warned me. Less sure**

**about vehicle pursuit but I**

**remember being surprised**

**he didn't hit me. Troops**

**recruited for assault on**

**helicarrier all low-level**

**muscle, no elites.**

"Why?" I asked. "And why did you pull the knife on me, instead of the gun? You'd have had me."

He didn't answer for a long time, eyes on the floor. Then he looked up at me with the thousand-yard stare, the mark of the walking dead: _this one will die the first chance he gets_.

"As for Fury and Hill, yeah. We went over that in the debriefing. I left live witnesses with viable communication behind me; I think I was trying to give more of them a chance to get out alive. And maybe give them a chance to take me down, get me out one way or another. But on the helicarrier—" his voice trailed off. He swallowed and took a deep breath, tried again. "I was trying to kill you," he said, "because Loki told me to bring you in alive. Guess which one of us was winning."

"You owe me for both of us, then," I said quietly. He thought about that, then nodded.

"Pay me back," I said. "Go talk to Selvig. Learn to do what he did."

He closed his eyes briefly, nodded again. After a moment he pulled out his phone and sent off a text, then started re-packing his bag. When he was nearly finished, his phone beeped, and he picked it up. He sighed and shook his head, sent a short reply, kept packing.

"What?" I asked.

"Finding out how many of the agents Loki took over survived. Only two, besides me and Selvig. All the rest got killed."

"Who are the other two?"

"Names are Hernandez and Dupree. I don't know either of them. They're both in the infirmary in Albuquerque."

"Are they..."

"They were wounded when we stole the Tesseract. They're in pretty bad shape still, but conscious. They were still under Loki's control when he got sent back. Now they have no idea what happened."

"You going down there?"

"Yep. Soon as I can get a flight. Then once I've done what I can for them, I'll see Selvig." He looked up at me again, his gaze more sharply focused now. "You wouldn't answer me last time, so I'm asking again. What did Loki do to you?"

"He took you. I want you back."

He met my eyes with an effort. "I'll work on it."

* * *

1 _Spasibo_—thank you

2 _Pisduk_—bullshitter

3_ Khorosho? / Da, spasibo_—Okay? / Yes, thank you.

4 _Bozhe moy_—my God

5 VDV veterans: you can find them on youtube. It's a good song.

6 _Moy brat_—my brother

7 _Sokolinovo_—Hawkeye

(Thanks to qdammit for beta, Jen for surgical strike beta x 2, and SJ for Russian vocabulary and transliteration.)


End file.
